April — Wheat-fields in April. 1 1 3 



and the farmers often made arrangements which might 

 be good and reasonable on the solid earth that we in- 

 habit, but which, for the clearest artistic reasons, would 

 be perfectly intolerable in a picture ; and such an opinion 

 would be compatible with the profoundest reverence for 

 the Divine arrangements, and a sincere respect for the 

 useful work of agriculture. The material world was not 

 made exclusively for the purpose of being painted ; it 

 has other uses, and there may be some incompatibility 

 between those other uses and the exigencies of artistic 

 color or composition. Who would venture to paint a 

 wheat-field at the beginning of April ? Its intense crude 

 green may be in itself agreeable as a refreshing change 

 after the grays and browns of winter, but it harmonizes 

 with nothing else in the landscape, and the quantity of 

 it is unmanageably great for a color of such intensity. 

 And if a wheat-field is too dangerous to be thought of, 

 what shall we say to such a blinding phenomenon as a 

 flowering field of rape ? The difference between color 

 and colors could not be more vividly illustrated. In the 

 artistic sense the rape is devoid of color, though it is of 

 the most glaring yellow, and a patch of it on a hillside 

 flares over leagues of landscape. Not only ought artists 

 to avoid painting crudities of this kind, but they ought 

 even to avoid looking at them. It is enough to paralyze 

 any delicate color-faculty to live near a flowering rape- 

 field, at least so long as the abomination lasts. The 

 balance of color in the entire landscape is destroyed by 

 it, and the eye is rendered insensible to modulation. 

 There are times when even wild plants may be a danger 



8 



